Pictures & Words

We had a great opportunity to witness and celebrate the joining of two spectacularly cool, warmly generous, and just all-around good eggs—our niece Carly and her husband, Justin. A Friday wedding was a first for me, and I will say that it was a lot of fun. A ton of family was there—many who we haven’t seen for some time. The venue was Turner Hall in Milwaukee—a great place to see a concert, and an even better place to hold a wedding. We had a great time getting to catch up with people, meeting new members of the family, and participating in the wedding.

As verbose as I usually am, I’m going to let photos speak for me: visit the album here. It’s very special to get to celebrate the sacred bond of marriage—and the beginning of this journey for Carly and Justin. Best wishes to them as they start this new phase of their lives together; may they be happy, healthy, and treat each other with the deepest love.

The internet is awash with cat photos. My guess is that this happens because cats are plentiful, and they seem to be good motionless subjects for photographers to work on. Around our house, they’re plentiful as well. We have Boo—the cow-cat, Arwen—the quintessential Siamese, Michael-Michelle—the cat with the most beautiful green eyes we’ve ever seen, and Jamie—the Egyptian Sphinx with very little hair. My issue is that none of them are ever motionless long enough for me to get a decent shot!

Jamie was sunning himself in the window this weekend, so I took advantage of a rare opportunity to snap off some shots. I’ve been happy with how accurately the DP3 Merrill focuses in these situations. It’s not the fastest camera out there, but it does really seem to nail the focus. And the last image of this series is a 100% crop—the detail this camera cranks out is incredible.

Spring. Yard work. Raking leaves. Prepping gardens. And some years, taking down trees and limbs. This past weekend we put the finishing touches on clearing out a cedar grove in the dog yard—taking out six medium to large cedars. For those of you who worry about the trees—fear not, there are dozens more scattered around the yard. But these particular set were pretty scruffy, nothing nice grew under them (mainly nightshade), and they blocked the view of the sunset. Noah and I got our stuff together and I climbed the trees on a 16’ ladder, tied a rope to as high as I could reach, tied the other end to the tractor, and put tension on the rope as I cut the back cut that would fell the tree. That worked great for five out of the six. The last one was clearly leaning the wrong way, and there was a decent bit of breeze out. As I was taking the front side notch it started to go (it really was leaning the wrong way). Noah valiantly gave the tractor some juice, but the rope snapped and the tree fell on top of the wire farm fence. The good news is that with the branches and the high cut, it did negligible damage, and we were able to cut around it and get the fence cleared in short order. I might add that I had a nice drop cloth hanging from the roll bar on the tractor just for the case of a rope snap—it would save Noah from getting whipped across the back. But as luck would have it, the rope went the other way.

The clearing.

The brush pile. I can’t wait to burn this!

The wood pile. This is a combination of cedar and oak. We’ll use it for bonfires over the next couple years...

The bonfire, waiting for a match. This (and all the photos) was taken with the DP3 Merrill. I love the way this camera isolates subjects at this distance. The rendering is remarkable.